The Decline of Traditional Media

Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.

By Lee Mcintyre

| May 2018

With the progression of technology and social media comes an entirely new landscape to how people interact or respond to news!Photo by Getty Images

Post-Truth by Lee McIntyrePhoto by MIT Press

What, exactly, is Post-Truth? (MIT Press, 2018) Is it wishful thinking, political spin, mass delusion, bold-faced lying? McIntyre analyzes recent examples—claims about inauguration crowd size, crime statistics, and the popular vote—and finds that post-truth is an assertion of ideological supremacy by which its practitioners try to compel someone to believe something regardless of the evidence. Yet post-truth didn't begin with the 2016 election; the denial of scientific facts about smoking, evolution, vaccines, and climate change offers a road map for more widespread fact denial. Add to this the wired-in cognitive biases that make us feel that our conclusions are based on good reasoning even when they are not, the decline of traditional media and the rise of social media, and the emergence of fake news as a political tool, and we have the ideal conditions for post-truth. McIntyre also argues provocatively that the right wing borrowed from postmodernism—specifically, the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth—in its attacks on science and facts.

It is no secret that one of the recent facilitators of the “in- formation silo”—which has fed our built-in predilection for confirmation bias—is the rise of social media. That story cannot be told, though, without first coming to grips with the decline of traditional media.

In its heyday, what is today called the American “prestige press” (the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal) and network television (ABC, CBS, and NBC) were the main sources for news. “In 1950, the average daily total paid circulation for U.S. daily newspapers was 53.8 million (equivalent to 123.6 per cent of households).” Think about that for a minute. That is over 100 percent. So some households were subscribing to not one but two newspapers. “By 2010, the average daily total paid circulation of U.S. daily newspapers was about 43.4 million (equivalent to 36.7 per cent of households).” Think about that too; that means a loss of readership of almost 70 percent. Over at the television networks, since the 1950s the news has been delivered each evening by an anchorman for half an hour on a nationwide broadcast.2 Walter Cronkite sat at the big desk at CBS from 1962 to 1981 and was often cited as “the most trusted man in America.”

Many think of this as the “golden age” for news. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the competition from TV networks had caused many smaller newspapers to go out of business. This “left most major American cities with a de facto monopoly paper, one which was better, richer, and more serious than those papers that had existed some twenty years earlier.” And on television? Because they were expected to broadcast only half an hour of news a day, the networks could put most of their effort into investigative reporting. Other than the occasional (and terrifying) alerts saying “we interrupt this broadcast to bring you a special bulletin” that portended war or assassination, the news was confined to its own niche, so that TV stations could profit from their entertainment programming.

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Although there wasn’t much news on TV, this turned out to be a blessing for the news divisions, because they were not expected to make any money. Ted Koppel explains: Network executives were afraid that a failure to work in the “public interest, convenience and necessity,” as set forth in the Radio Act of 1927, might cause the Federal Communications Commission to suspend or even revoke their licenses. The three major networks pointed to their news divisions (which operated at a loss or barely broke even) as evidence that they were fulfilling the FCC’s mandate. News was, in a manner of speaking, the loss leader that permitted NBC, CBS and ABC to justify the enormous profits made by their entertainment divisions.

This began to change with the appearance of the CBS news show 60 Minutes in 1968, which (after its first three years) became the first news show in history to turn a profit. Suddenly a lightbulb went on at the networks. Although it did not change the model or expectations for TV news immediately, network executives began to see that news could be profitable.

Still, the golden age of broadcasting persisted right through the 1970s, but then the Iran hostage crisis of 1979 led to a conundrum. The public was suddenly hungry for more news, but how could this be accommodated without disrupting the hugely profitable entertainment broadcasts? Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show over at NBC was a beast. CBS had all but given up by running a late movie during that time slot. ABC was running prime time reruns. Then someone had an idea: The ABC television network at the time decided to try something different by moving the daily Iran briefing to the late evening. This was also a marketing decision: ABC had no late-night programming against Johnny Carson’s venerable talk show on its rival NBC, and news programming was, by comparison, cheap. ABC filled the evening slot with a new program called Nightline devoted solely to coverage of the [hostage] crisis. Each night, ABC would splash the screen with “America Held Hostage,” followed by the number of days of captivity. The anchor (usually the veteran ABC newsman Ted Koppel) would then fill the time by interviewing experts, journalists, and other figures associated with the crisis.

All of the media is absent of consciousness and is taking the human being away from the best that it is naturally. Society is more barbaric than ever now but we are going to stop and eliminate hate and pollution off the face of earth. Love fixes mistakes, let love run the show for goodness sake.

Delicia

1/11/2019 4:48:08 PM

I just expect factual news like we had with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley and Bob Downs. These guys reported the news as it really was instead of this garbage we're being fed via newspaper, social media, and radio. Now it's biased opinionated junk who, in some cases, have become paid whores to the highest bidder. It has gotten so bad that it has helped the American people to become divided and exceptionally angry and hateful........which a nation divided is one that can easily fall. Whether it's news in a paper or other form it needs to factual.
One other note. The cost of newspapers skyrocketed and the content didn't. Who wants to pay a lot of money for very few pages of news and tons of ads? And for bullshit at that. Well, at least one thing positive came out of the decline of the newspaper.........less trees are being cut down for that purpose.

Mstocker

5/4/2018 8:28:33 AM

While the author does bring up some important historical underpinnings to the decline of the news, the actual death knell was when President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 into law. There were a lot of moving parts to this, but the upshot was that media outlets could become a corporate asset; media consolidation was permissible, and the utility of fourth estate was converted from informing the breadth of public discourse into share value. For Clinton's "bold move" of signing this into law he (and the American Public) was promptly awarded with a lurid two-year excavation into an Oval Office blow-job. This Act was also the death knell of our representative democracy. When General Electric (a major war contractor) owns NBC, they have no incentive to report on any of the meaningless wars advanced by those who would otherwise be representatives of the will of the public, and the public is none-the-wiser about how our gold and blood are being laid at the altar of "market value" of what was once the watch-dog of how well our democracy was running. - Michael Stocker - info@OCR.org